


Torn-Out Centerfold

by scioscribe



Category: Slumber Party Massacre (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Frottage, Sharing a Bed, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:27:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27457204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Get over it. Don't dream. And think happy thoughts.
Relationships: Valerie "Val" Bates/Trish Devereaux
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Torn-Out Centerfold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [track_04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/gifts).



The first time they slept together—

Scratch that.

Their first sleepover, their first slumber party—back when Trish could use any of those words without feeling like a scream was building up in her throat—was normal, which meant that at first Trish had been pretty sure they weren’t going to sleep at all. They were just going to eat some ice cream—enough of it that the last couple spoonfuls melted into the cooling fudge down at the bottom of the bowl—and watch movies that futzed out into static whenever somebody took her top off. They were just going to talk about boys, which meant, like usual, that Trish was going to have to wrack her brain to come up with who she wanted to talk about. It was okay not to date much because everybody knew what high school boys were, but you had to have crushes. There had to be _men_ , movie stars and singers and stuff. That came up at sleepovers all the time.

But it didn’t come up with her and Valerie, somehow. They talked about a lot of things, but they never really got around to boys.

They talked about basketball a lot, about the way free throws slowed you down until you could feel a single drop of sweat snaking down your skin, the way Trish had gotten benched once for humiliating a Greenbriar girl with an ankle breaker dribble that had put her smack down on the floor, the frisson like a lightning bolt when you pulled off a behind-the-back pass on the bounce.

Trish remembered looking at Val one time that night, when Val looked down to scrape her spoon along the bottom of her bowl; she remembered thinking, _I bet we could pull that off, you and me._

And the funny thing was, they actually slept. And Trish had brought her sleeping bag, but she didn’t use it. Val said she always slept on her side anyhow, so they fit in her bed pretty easily, side-by-side.

Val had a real nightie, plain cotton. It could have looked straight out of _Little House on the Prairie_ , but it was too short to have ever showed up on Laura Ingalls. It showed off her thighs, all firm from running up and down the court all day.

It was barely longer than Trish’s Dodgers shirt, really.

The Dodgers shirt wound up with blood on it, a couple of weeks later. And Trish wound up not sleeping.

***

She was getting by okay. She thought so, anyway, because they were letting her go back to school again, and the first time she had tried that, one of her teachers had called her mom for her before it was even noon.

So she was wearing a lot more makeup than she used to, to put some color in her face, but she was getting by okay.

Val wasn’t, though. Val looked like—God, like she'd died that night after all, with all the light gone out of her eyes, with dark emptiness where there used to be the real Val, the one who looked at Trish across the length of the gym showers and made her skin tighten up.

Val was _gone_ , and nobody was looking after her. Nobody Trish knew, anyway. Maybe things were different at her house—but then, Val’s little sister had gotten all mixed up in the hell of that night too, so maybe her parents were all tied up scrambling around trying to take care of the kid. All Trish could see was that Val needed somebody, for God’s sake. But the only teacher Val had gotten close to before all this was Coach Jana, so nobody was keeping an eye on her and dragging her out of class, nobody was calling her mom for her. And she didn’t have any friends, not any besides Trish, if Trish even counted.

If you could count her based on one little sleepover, and if you didn’t take her out of the running because of how she’d freaked that night and guessed that Val might have been in on it with Thorn.

She had to keep herself in the running, though, she figured, because if she did knock herself out, then Val really did have nobody.

Funny how Trish had plenty of people tying themselves into knots trying to see she didn’t have some kind of screaming breakdown in the middle of the cafeteria, and she barely noticed them. All she noticed was Val.

 _Same as it ever was,_ she thought, like Val had moved to Venice a hundred years ago instead of just three months back. _I’m a bad person. Everyone’s dead and gone and I still keep thinking about her._

Except at night, when she thought about Russ Thorn. When every little squeak of the house and hum of the fridge sounded like the whine of a drill.

It made sense that Val was the one thing in her life that would drown out that night. It didn’t matter that Val reminded her of it; _everything_ reminded her of it. Val was maybe the only signal in the world that could cut through the static that filled up Trish’s head. And even if she couldn’t—even if Trish was going to survive Russ Thorn just to fall apart in dribs and drabs of exhaustion—then maybe she could help Val, and somebody had to. Somebody had to do something.

Trish made her move in gym class, on a Wednesday.

They were both benched during gym now, and Trish couldn’t figure out how she felt about it. Sure, if she tried to run right now, she’d probably wind up tripping over her own feet; it was just about all she could do to drag herself up out of bed in the mornings. But she wanted to be able to move. She wanted that chest-heaving, shattered-crystal feeling of breaking through and getting a second wind, wanted the lactic acid burn in her muscles as she worked them too hard. She wanted to feel dead of something good for a change. But even with the makeup, she must have looked like some kind of zombie, because they didn’t let her try it, just like they didn’t let Val.

Trish sat down next to her on the bench. Val’s head twitched towards her in a kind of spasm Trish recognized right away.

“I keep doing that too,” she said, mostly looking at her own knees. There were springy little dark hairs there. She’d been forgetting to shave, which was maybe a good thing: lately, even when she remembered, she was still so clumsy that she cut herself. And blood was the last thing she wanted to see right now. “Flinching. Thinking I’ve got to run if somebody moves up beside me too fast.”

“Yeah,” Val said softly. For a second, it seemed like that was all she was going to say, but then she looked a little more Trish’s way. “But I don’t think anybody would like it if I started carrying a machete around.”

Trish felt her mouth flex in her first almost-smile in a long time. “ _I_ would.”

“Well, you’re the only one. You and Courtney, maybe.”

They sat there, backs against the wall, and watched their classmates—their best athletes all weeded out with a psycho’s goddamn drill—screw up royally at playing badminton.

Trish said, “Are you sleeping much?”

That got her a half-strangled little laugh. “No.”

“Me neither,” Trish said, feeling emboldened now. “I hate being in my house. They sent me to the nurse’s office here once and I slept in there.”

“I haven’t slept anywhere. I keep thinking—” She stopped.

“What?” She was really curious, too. She didn’t know what it had been like for Val that night, not really. Only that Val had probably been glad, in the end, not to be invited to the party.

“What do you think? Kim dangling out of your fridge. Trying to hide and hope he wouldn’t hear me, hope he wouldn’t hear Courtney. That chainsaw—” She made that not-a-laugh noise again. “I tried to use a chainsaw from your garage, you know. I ran up the stairs with it, and then the goddamn cord caught and almost yanked me down again. If I fall asleep, I dream I make it all the way out to him and then I swing it at him and it just dies in my hands. Sputters out. And he kills you, and he kills me, and he kills Courtney—”

Her voice was getting louder, and a couple of the girls out on the floor turned around to look at them, their eyes wide with that gossip-addict look, that gimme-that-sweet-rush-babe look. Valerie Bates and Trish Deveraux, newly voted most likely to spend graduation gibbering in a corner.

Trish raised her chin and stared them all down, injecting every last bit of idiotic popularity into her look that she could, and they backed down and went back to chasing shuttlecocks around.

“That’s pretty good,” Val said. She had a weak smile on her face.

“Too bad it doesn’t work on killers. That’s where the machete comes in handy.”

“And it’s cordless.”

“What if I slept over at your place?” Trish said.

It was what she’d wanted to ask the whole time, but now the suddenness of having asked it made her face burn.

She’d asked Val to the party, too, but Val had said no. She’d heard them all talking about her.

But there was nobody left to talk to, except the two of them. And all the real thoughts Trish had had about Val were ones she’d never been able to tell anyone—ones she could sometimes barely even tell herself.

“Unless—” Her voice started to wobble a little, but she caught it in time. “Unless just seeing me, you know, brings it all back.”

“No,” Val said immediately, shaking her head. “No, it doesn’t. I mean, you don’t. And—sure. If you think it would help you to be somewhere else, of course you can stay at my place.”

“Would it help _you_?”

“Maybe.” Val’s smile turned a little less weak, a little more slanting and genuinely amused. “It’d be pretty different, anyway.”

***

The second time they slept together, all they did was sleep, and they both slept. It was the heaviest, most dreamless sleep Trish had ever had in her whole life. It was like thick wet wool had come down around her, blacking out everything else. It was sleep she could have suffocated in.

Val said she’d slept the same way, and she met Trish’s eyes when she said it, so Trish knew she wasn’t just lying to make her feel better.

After that, they made a habit of it.

(“Are you sure this is good for you?” Trish’s mom asked. She sounded delicate about it, like she was holding the question with tweezers—half like she was thinking of the counselor the cops had brought in, when Trish hadn’t been able to stop crying, and half like she was still thinking about the way the two of them had fumbled around talking about Trish’s copy of _Rubyfruit Jungle_. “Are you sure this is healthy, Trish? That it’s all okay with Valerie’s parents?”

“Val saved my life, Mom. I can’t think of anybody it’d be healthier for me to be around than that.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I know. I know.” She touched Trish’s cheek, and Trish saw that her eyes were bright with tears. “God, I wish we’d never left that night.”

 _But you did,_ Trish wanted to say, totally unfairly. _You left, you left me._ She swallowed the words down. It had to be better to cling to Val than to her parents, right? It was more grown-up. And anybody in their right mind would cling to Val—Val and her machete and the way she’d come in swinging.

“Just be careful,” her mom said finally.

“I will,” Trish said. But she didn’t have the best fix on the concept anymore, really. What was careful, in a world where stuff like this could happen?)

It turned into an every night kind of thing, her sleeping in Val’s bed. Trish got used to waking up with Val spooned up to her back. Sometimes Trish’s T-shirt rode up in the night, and she knew Val was tucked tight against her right up against her underwear, with just a little bit of cotton between them. She could feel the heat of Val’s body. After she got enough sleep to not be on the verge of dying all the time, it started driving her crazy.

She tried hard to bottle it up, because the last thing she wanted to do was give Val a reason to kick her out of bed, especially when they were both finally inching back to being functional. Weird—screwy, even—but functional. She liked the way things were, aside from waking up every morning with her clit throbbing and her cunt so wet and hot and soft that she felt like just slipping one finger down there would be enough to bring her off. You could live with being so revved up all the time you thought your skin was about to split apart and send all your messiness spilling out into the world. You could if it meant sleep. If it meant staying close to a girl who could fight like hell and cut off a man’s hand with a machete. You could do a lot for that.

But some nights, even with the two of them together, it was hard to hang onto sleep.

One time, Trish woke up to Val’s arms around her, rocking her back and forth. They were sitting up and her face was buried in Val’s hair, which smelled like coconut shampoo and, underneath that, metallically-tangy fear-sweat. Either she’d scared Val or something else had.

“It’s okay,” Val was saying. “It’s okay, Trish, it’s okay, I promise. He’s dead, he’s dead. He can’t hurt anybody anymore.”

She was okay. She was okay because Val was telling her she was and—and Val hadn’t been there that night, not _with_ them, not the way Trish had wanted her to be. So if Val was here right now, that meant that Trish had lived through that night after all.

She pulled back shakily. Her throat hurt enough that she guessed that she knew what had scared Val. “Was I screaming?”

“You were trying to.” Val pushed some of Trish’s hair back from her face, clearing some of the sweat-soaked strands off her cheeks, and Trish’s heart gave an unwelcome, enormous thud. It was just like something Val would have done for Courtney, Trish told herself. It didn’t mean anything other than that Val was nice. “You were making that kind of choked noise, you know. Like those nights when you dream you’re trying your hardest to scream and nothing comes out, like your vocal cords are all paralyzed. That’s what you sounded like.”

That hit too close to home for too many of her nightmares. Trish said, “I’m sorry you know what that’s like.”

“Me too,” Val said. Her laugh, even when it was quiet, was a little less strained and a little less self-conscious lately, at least when they were alone. “But at least that goes back before that Driller Killer _asshole_. I guess my brain just likes to go all-out on the nightmares.”

“Do you ever get back to sleep afterwards?”

“Yeah, sometimes. Usually. I just—” Val broke off, and even in the mostly-dark room, Trish thought she could see Val flush. “I just think about something else. Something, um, happier.”

Happier. Well, she couldn’t get much unhappier than Russ Thorn, so anything else would be better in comparison.

 _If I really wanted to be happy,_ Trish thought, _I’d think about you._ But she couldn’t say that.

“I’ll try to think happy thoughts,” she said instead.

Val smiled. “That’s the spirit, Tinkerbell.” She bopped one finger against the crown of Trish’s head. “Fairy dust.”

Now that was _really_ close to how she would have talked to Courtney. But there was something underneath it all, something in the shadowed blush on Val’s face, that made Trish wonder if all that bubblegum-pink sisterliness wasn’t some kind of a front after all.

***

Then, inevitably, it was Val’s turn to have a nightmare. Trish got a pretty good heads-up that it was happening because Val kicked her out of bed.

Still groggy, Trish pulled herself up. She stayed standing—swaying—because she didn’t want to wind up getting kicked again. Val was thrashing back and forth, her hands stuck in the sheets in rigor-mortis claws, cords of muscle standing out in her throat. What woke Trish up, even more than hitting the floor, was the sound leaking out of Val: that strained _ahh_ -howl that she knew in her bones was the same sound she’d made herself a couple of nights ago. That trying-to-scream-and-not-making-it sound. She wanted to get Val as far away from that feeling as possible. She touched Val’s hair, tentatively, and Val whipped around. Her eyes were blearily open, flooded with tears, but Trish could tell she wasn’t seeing anything. Not anything more recent than That Night, anyway.

“Val, it’s okay.” There just wasn’t much she could come up with, as far as reassurance went. She tried to echo what Val had said to her, because after all, that had worked, hadn’t it? “Val, he’s dead. We killed him.”

She didn’t mean to—she didn’t even think about it—but she leaned in and pressed her lips against Val’s forehead.

“You’re safe. Courtney’s safe.”

“Trish?” Val’s voice sounded distant. Her eyes had fallen closed again, her eyelashes long and tear-matted into spikes.

“Yeah?”

“Trish is safe?”

Trish’s chest tightened up. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m safe.” She squeezed Val’s hand. Val’s fingers were stiff and chilled, but they seemed to come alive against Trish’s, warming up and softening. She rubbed her thumb over Val’s knuckles. “Everything’s fine, okay? Everything’s really good now, Val.”

It finally seemed to sink in, with Val blinking a couple of times like she was waking up. Then, her voice thick with sleep, she said, “Trish? Was I having a nightmare?”

“Yeah. I can’t imagine why.”

Val exhaled hard through her nose. “Total mystery, right?”

Trish lay down next to her and, not sure whether she should or not, put her arm across her.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No,” Val said. Trish saw one corner of her mouth curve up, her cheeks rounding. It showed off the pale tear-tracks, shining in the lemony glow coming off the night-light. “Not really.”

Trish smiled too. “I wouldn’t either.”

Val turned her head until her cheek was resting against Trish’s shoulder. She didn’t say or do anything; she just stayed like that, her breath gently stirring Trish’s hair around.

Finally, Trish said, “Happy thoughts?”

Val started. “Happy—oh.” She rolled away, putting herself so far on the other side of the narrow bed that she actually managed to get a clear inch of space between them.

Trish didn’t like it. She felt cold all of a sudden, the air wicking against her skin without the warmth of Val’s body next to hers.

“Happy thoughts,” Val said. “Yeah. Um, I meant I—you know.” She shifted. “I keep a _Playgirl_ under my bed. At least when Courtney hasn’t swiped it and torn out the centerfold.”

“Oh.” Now she was all cold-hot, her senses jumbled up. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Val said quickly. “She stole my last one back when—back before all that. I couldn’t take it back from her after that. The poor kid needs all the fun she can get right now.”

Didn’t they all. “What was the centerfold?” Trish said, just because she couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

She could hear Val breathing in the dark. Then Val said, “I don’t remember, really. I don’t think I would have been in the mood for it anyway.”

“Because of the nightmare?”

“Because lately I’ve been thinking about something else.” She was looking at Trish’s pillow, not at her face. “You don’t really date much, do you?”

Trish felt a kind of all-over embarrassment, a pounding of her blood that she was surprised didn’t wake up the whole house. The muscles in her thighs tensed, pulling tight like they were trying to make smooth, taut arrows pointing straight at her pussy.

“No,” she said. Her voice sounded funny even to her. “I don’t like high school guys.”

Val hesitated. “Do you like any guys?”

What did it matter? Trish almost turned over on her side to cut the conversation off—she almost made up one of the old, familiar lies about Harrison Ford or somebody. If Val had been keeping _Playgirls_ stashed under her mattress, then _she_ liked guys. End of story—most of the time. But not always.

And maybe if you lived through a psycho with a drill taking out just about everybody else you knew, you had to just suck it up and be brave for a second lousy time in your goddamn life.

“No,” Trish said. “I like you, though.”

Val said softly, “I like you too.”

Trish didn’t think they could have planned it if they’d tried. They just sort of slid forward against each other, locking awkwardly together. They were too rushed and they didn’t know what they were doing; it was like banging down on two puzzle pieces with your fist to make them stick together. Val’s lips still had the faint taste of salt on them from where she’d cried in her sleep, and Trish licked against them, sucking at them, not knowing if what she was doing was hot or just clumsy. But Val made a noise against her, the vibration of the sound catching between them, a hum that seemed to reverberate all the way down Trish’s body.

She had gotten Val’s thigh between her legs somehow, and the pressure was driving her crazy. Every time she moved to get more into Val’s mouth—like she could climb all the way inside her if she just tried hard enough—her cunt throbbed. It made her whimper.

Val turned her head, kissing hard at Trish’s jaw. She only had one hand free, since she was half-lying on her other arm, but she was grasping one of Trish’s breasts. She had her palm flat against the peaked nipple and it seemed to fascinate her, because she kept rolling her hand around like she just wanted to feel Trish rubbing against her like that, but every now and then she squeezed at her, like she didn’t know what else to do. Then her thumbnail edged against her nipple through the cotton and Trish gasped and Val _grinned_ , her teeth bright in the dark.

“Yeah,” Val whispered, and she did it again, more slowly this time. She drew the sharpness out into a kind of pinch, and Trish felt like she should be lighting up like a slot machine right now. _Winner, winner, winner_.

She thrust helplessly against Val’s leg. This wasn’t how she got herself off, usually, but it was too much right now to think about Val’s actual hand being up against her clit, Val’s _fingers_ pushing their way into her cunt. It would make her lose her mind. This was all she could take right now.

Val seemed to understand what she was going for, because she started rocking back and forth. Her teeth sank into her lower lip, and then she said, “Get your leg up?”

Trish did, but even she could tell the angle wasn’t really right for Val to ride her like that, not while she was doing this. But Val looked like she was intent on giving it a try.

Trish could barely pay attention to Val sliding back and forth against her leg, not with the feeling building up inside her as Val thrust against her, but at some point she thought she could feel how soaked Val’s underwear were. There was a wetness moving on her skin. And when it was morning, when they were sitting in gym class, stuck on the sidelines, the two survivors of the worst fucking slumber party in history, she would look at those fine little hairs up there she still hadn’t gotten to and see where they were all stiff from where Val had rubbed on her, from how wet Trish had made her—

She sucked in a deep breath, a hard pulse running through her. It was good, yeah, and she wanted to ride it out, pushing her hips in and out against Val’s thigh—but even more than it was good, it felt like what it was _supposed_ to be, it felt like a fucking _climax_. The end of all of this. She had to bury her head against Val’s breasts to keep from making too much noise, and then she realized she was crying.

 _Gushy_ , she thought, and for a second, she couldn’t keep her mind off blood, off the drill—but Val was making some hot, hard noise in the back of her throat, like the kind of grunt you did when you were running hard on the court, and Trish somehow stayed with her. They were safe together, in bed. That was why they were there in the first place.

She rolled, getting on top of Val and slotting her leg into the right place. She yanked Val’s nightgown up, hard, until she could see Val’s trembling belly, her flowered underwear so damp at her cunt that they were almost see-through. She watched her body bash up against Val’s, hard and undignified and totally uncoordinated; she watched the cotton slip-slide around.

She remembered Russ Thorn saying, _It takes a lot of love for a person to do this._

No. Not for that. That was just bullshit.

This, though: this was a hard twist of need in her, everything they’d been through together knotted up into something impossible to get past, something she didn’t even _want_ to get past. Something as blunt as this was, as blunt as they were. Maybe you didn’t need love for this either, but she had it. For Val, she had it in spades.

She slid her hand between her leg and Val’s cunt, and when Val came, she came against Trish’s upturned fingers.

Val slid off her and collapsed beside her.

“Courtney can keep the _Playgirl_ ,” Val said.

Trish covered her mouth with her hand—her fingers were slippery from rubbing up against Val’s underwear, and they smelled like her—to muffle her laugh. The weird, sweaty transcendence of it all was ebbing out now, letting everything else back in, but they were still okay. Love hadn’t messed them up, and she didn’t think it was going to. Things were getting better. _They_ were getting better.

And now they had this, and it felt like a whole new way to still be alive.

She said, “Better than a centerfold, huh?”

“Way, way better.”

“You think you’ll be able to get back to sleep?”

“If I can’t,” Val said, curling up against her, “then we’ll just have to do it again.”

Trish said, “I can live with that.”


End file.
